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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Women inthe World - The Daily Beast Plus Abigail Disney...

The Daily Beast hosted a most incredible gathering this past weekend in New York City. Though I hoped to attend a combination of my daughters 10th birthday celebration ( I love you Allie!!!) plus the storm kept me away. Click here and here for more on the event. Thank YOU Daily Beast for hosting this event, for the great writing, and the video content!

I had coffee today with my friend Abigail Disney. If you do not know about "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" read all about it now by clicking here. The film is a story about the women of Liberia and is a must see documentary. Help spread the word by clicking here.

1 comment:

While doing research for a recent presentation in Baltimore about the 6 C's of women's giving motivations plus 3, I used philanthropist Sheila Johnson as an example of the 9th C - Courage. Sheila Johnson's courage resulted in a 2008 documentary, A Powerful Noise, about three women who were reaching across old ethnic divides to heal post-war tensions in order to create jobs for women in her community. The documentary features a Vietnamese AIDS activist, a girl’s advocate from Mali, and a woman in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Sheila said she made this documentary because, "People tend to ignore something unless they see that it's going on with their own eyes. I really believe documentaries are going to be the new wave of the future because I think we’re in a transition phase in terms of technology. Well-told stories are powerful because they bring action.

In the past, I spent a lot of time going up to Capitol Hill, trying to convince congressmen and senators to pass legislation to alleviate global poverty. I have no doubt that if we simply went up there and showed them this film on global poverty, their reaction would be, “Okay. This is a no-brainer. Let’s pass the bill.” The link is http://www.apowerfulnoise.org/

Then earlier I saw the posting about the documentary made by Abigail Disney called Pray the Devil Back to Hell, that chronicles the remarkable story of the courageous Liberian women who came together to end a bloody civil war and bring peace to their shattered country.

How exciting that women have not only the courage, but the capital and confidence to get into this medium and take their/women's causes very public.

Stories have always played an important part in women's lives and taking them to the big screen is a wonderful idea. There has to be a connection between women making documentaries and Kathryn Bigelow's academy award for the Hurt Locker. I found the movie quite disturbing but that was the idea behind it. War is hell. And it surely seemed that it was filmed like a documentary. Now, I hope we make sure that smaller but equally important films like Abigail and Sheila's are shown locally as well as nationally.